Re: Info pages opened with an incorrect coding system

From:

Karl Berry

Subject:

Re: Info pages opened with an incorrect coding system

Date:

Mon, 9 Jul 2007 16:14:15 -0500

I agree that it should be the default.
Very well, I'll change that.
but still produce the Local Variables section, because without 8-bit
characters the result is a plain ASCII file.
As you know, if the input uses 8-bit characters, the output will also
use 8-bit characters, regardless of --enable-encoding.
source was written well,
I can't agree that it is bad to use literal characters instead of
Texinfo commands. It makes for a far more readable source, among other
things.
IOW, I think the fact that the document specifies @documentencoding
should be enough for makeinfo to obey; relying on an additional
command-line switch is unreliable.
I don't see that it's unreliable, although I could agree with
"inconvenient". I don't recall all the details of why we created
--enable-encoding all those years ago. At this point, it does seem more
useful to make it the default, so that any document with
@documentencoding gets the output in that encoding, as best we can
manage.
Wouldn't linking against libiconv solve all these with minimal fuss?
Sure, hopefully libiconv would be helpful, but I highly doubt the
"minimal fuss". I suspect it will mean essentially rewriting the entire
program (not that that would be a bad thing, but ...), because it is
changing the fundamental way in which characters are both read and
written. If you want to delve into it, you're welcome to try. I rather
doubt you have an excess of spare hacking time available either, though ...
Karl